Someone finally caught up and scolded him...
“Revolution” endured its creative ups and downs and never regained much of an audience after moving to the lead-off Wednesday 8 p.m. slot last fall."
I'm sure the creators are going to appreciate the sugarcoating this is being given. The reality of it is, Revolution was in danger since the early days of its run. After the first few episodes, when folks finally realized that everything wasn't going to be the visually awesome experience (See: Chicago and New York overrun by vegetation) with the awesome post apocalyptic story we were lead to believe it had, is when that happened. When it started to fray and devolve into a hamfisted soup of far too many characters, convoluted plot points and a terrible handling of the "it's 15 years later" continuity (The latter being a bigger problem in the first season then the second. The second season mostly ignored that fact because it was well established by that point, even though it relied heavily on older characters using dialog that made "antiquated" pop culture references that -aggravatingly- the younger characters wouldn't have known, but never asked "what's that?" whenever they were in earshot)
A long winter hiatus didn't hurt the show like Variety is claiming: The writing did. What show coming out of it's first season, that somehow gets a second, has it's creator (in this case, Eric Kripke) come out and issue something of an apology for how scatterbrained the first season was, having seen the mess it had become after the time he could pump the breaks had passed, with a promise to rein it in, in the second season?(which, for the record, it did-- but also became boring and meandering in the process)
None. An apology usually happens because a show didn't get a second season, not because it did.
I generally like Kripke; Supernatural -when under his creation and watch- was one of my favorite shows (Now.. Not so much). But he proved after that first season of Revolution, and confirmed it -even though he didn't say it outright- in the post-first-season apology, that he can't write/create for more then a few characters at a time. When the cast is smaller (even smaller then Season 2 of Revolution was) he can put together a great story, but when he goes past a certain number, the juggling just seems to become too hard.
It sucks too, in a post Terra Nova world (Read: That show was terrible), we could have used a good high concept network genre show to cleanse our pallets.
As for the rest of the Cancellations:
I wanted Believe to go somewhere, but it didn't seem to be (A FEW SPOILERS BELOW, IN CASE YOU CARE). You can call it a slow boil, but every episode wasn't procedural as much as it was a carbon copy of the one before it. I had to tell my fiance to watch it on her own, because I couldn't keep going with the trajectory I saw the show going in.
My biggest grievance being -and I may have missed a plot point having to do with this after I gave up- that the girl could see and do so many amazing things, but she couldn't see the guy she bickered with on a daily basis was her dad? Or maybe she was just easing him into it while driving him out of his mind? Either way, it was a huge reveal made in the first episode that shouldn't have been made till somewhere down the line -it showed it's big card far too soon and made me fold before it could get me properly, all-in, invested... And that was a poker analogy from a guy who doesn't play.
It's a shame though, because Johnny Sequoya and Luke McLaughlin had real chemistry. Even though it got annoying (because we knew who he was to her who he was, but they didn't -and the girl probably should have too) over time, the bickering between them felt realistic.. Although for as smart as he actually seemed, McLaughlin's character kept making the same stupid mistakes with her (leaving her alone when he knew she'd run off to help X-person-of-the-week), week after week, and it contributed to it's unbelievability.
No pun intended.
Fine, maybe a little.
Almost Human, however, upsets me a little. I'm a pretty big fan of what Karl Urban does as an actor. So to see him lose a show that felt like a perfect fit for him is disappointing.
The problem is, like Believe, the show felt like it was put on the same slow boil setting, while having a sort of scatterbrained -but not quite as bad, daunting to keep up with or many as Revolution ever was/had- series of arcs that didn't feel as important as, or along side, the "of the week" police procedural structure. Something tells me that if this show didn't drip with Fox's signature visuals (because every network seems to have their own) that this show would have seen at least a second season on NBC, if it were over there.
Fox didn't help it one bit, doing what they do with everything, by putting episodes out of order while sticking long downtime in between episodes of a show they claim to want to grow and prosper. They certainly helped this show out the door this time (knowing there are Fox apologists out there who like to say that Fox gives genre television bigger chances then others -which certainly isn't quite as true any more, judging by the increasing number of genre shows on all networks these days. Sci-fi and Fantasy has become big business in our more geek friendly world.)
Ultimately, am I surprised at all of these cancellations? Nope, not at all. I'm not even completely bothered by most of them.
What I am bothered by is the reason why Bad Robot doesn't have any new shows on tap for next season; because they had too many things on the plate this season and didn't think they'd need anything for the next.
Yeaaahhhh... I'm sorry, but that just seems like poor planning. As if someone wasn't watching anything that was happening with the shows talked about here. Like the plane has been put on auto-pilot in the Grand Canyon.
With how many shows Bad Robot goes through in any given season since the companies rise, and how that number has increased dramatically over the years, I'm starting to wonder if they're pulling some sort of disjointed TV version of that line about the movie industry: "Being in the business of not making movies."
Or they're just trying to find that weird, smoke monster creating, Lost lightning again... Yeah... Let's believe that instead.
(Side notes and site stuff: I wrote this as a comment on the variety article linked, and because I'm me and can't stop picking at my work, I've cleaned it up a bit here -I had forgotten to finish whole sections of the comment. So should you read the comments and find the same(-ish) words there, that's me.. I've decided that one way or another, if I'm going to keep up with one or the other (commenting places or writing this blog) the two will very likely have to overlap and become one.
I'm back -that's obvious from this- and will have a bit of a story sometime, hopefully, about what went on while I was away. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with this like I was doing before I had to slam the breaks after Christmas. We'll see though, this years been rough stuff.)
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